If you yearn to live a life of meaning and purpose, joy and peace, then Christianityworks is for you: full of life-changing, practical Bible teaching to help you live out the victory that you already have, in Jesus Christ.

Series: Discovering God in our Suffering

Suffering – well, by definition is never easy. It’s never a place we want to be in. But suffering is a reality of life. It’s a place we simply have to travel through from time to time.In this series, Berni takes us on a journey through different type of suffering – and discovers that no matter how dark those places are – God is there.

War and conflict are a fact of life. All around the globe war is raging. Conflict is a daily fact of life. Question is: where is God? Has He deserted us – or is He there right here in the middle of it? If I were to ask you how many wars are being fought […]

War and conflict are a fact of life. All around the globe war is raging. Conflict is a daily fact of life. Question is: where is God? Has He deserted us – or is He there right here in the middle of it?

If I were to ask you how many wars are being fought in the world right now, what would your answer be? Five or ten? Well I guess it depends on how you define a war.

The United Nations defines major wars as “Military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year”. In 1965 there were about ten major wars under way, there are currently about eight major wars under way, down from fifteen at the end of 2003, and as many as two dozen lesser conflicts ongoing with varying degrees of intensity. Most of those are civil intrastate wars fuelled as much by racial and ethnic or religious animosities as by ideological fervour.

Most victims are civilians, a feature that distinguishes modern conflicts. I mean during World War I civilians made up fewer than 5% of all casualties. Today 75% or more of those killed or wounded in wars are non combatants.

Africa, to a greater extent than any other continent, is afflicted by war. Africa’s been marred by more than twenty major civil wars since 1960. Rwanda, Somalia, Angola, Sudan, Liberia and Burundi are among those countries that have recently suffered serious armed conflict.

Now they’re pretty scary statistics. The source by the way is the website globalsecurity.org. It lists 42 significant conflicts going on in the world today. And really, at any one time we can expect between 40 and 50 to be going on. Now you might say to me, “Berni, why are you talking about wars today?”

Well even though I’m an Australian, yes this program is heard across Australia and New Zealand and many Western countries. I’ve done a quick tally, you see this program is also heard in Africa, in the Pacific, in Asia and on the Sub Continent and there are as least as many people listening to this program today who live in a conflict zone or in a place that’s recovering from a conflict as there are who are living in relative affluence in the West.

I regularly receive responses from people in refugee camps, people who have lost family members. One man wrote to us just a few weeks ago who had lost 14 members of his extended family in a war. A dear friend of mine in Africa his brother was killed just a couple of months ago in a conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

One of the stations that airs this program in Africa regularly gets attacked by rebels. We in the West, we see this stuff on our brand new plasma or LCD flat panel TV’s and we’re almost desensitised. And to be really blunt, the people are normally black or Asian or Middle Eastern and our news services place so much more emphasis and importance on white European people being killed than black or Asian or Middle Eastern. It’s really sad but it’s true.

There is suffering happening today around the world on a mass scale and the affluent West kind of tunes out because it’s too hard. But each of these statistics involves countless millions of people suffering in ways that, frankly I can’t understand.

How many refugees do you think there are in the world today? The answer is 15 to 20 million up from 3 million in the 1970’s. How many slaves are there in the world today? Over 20 million people are living in slavery and bondage, many of those children, many forced into prostitution.

There are countless more. People who are oppressed, people who live in constant fear of being arrested where, where there’s no due process of law, no judicial independence, no presumption of innocence, not even a requirement for them to be charged before they’re thrown into jail. And they rot there for the next 2 decades or the rest of their lives. Countless wives are being beaten, women are being raped, children are being exploited. There is an unimaginable human toll.

25,000 children die each day of starvation and it raises a huge question, if God is God how can He allow this to happen, how can He allow this to go on? How could He create a world where people suffer like this? Do you struggle with that? I do. I know the answer. I know God gave each of us a free will and humanity has such an amazing capacity to exercise that freedom with, with indescribable greed and depravity that bring on this suffering that bring on these wars.

I’m going to talk specifically today to those who are suffering in these places, to the woman in the refugee camp whose husband and sons have been killed in the conflict. To the husband whose wife has been raped, to the parents who can’t provide food for their children because, because the rebels won’t let the food come through.

God, God didn’t cause this and God is not punishing you and I can’t give you an answer as you ask the question, why me? I just can’t. But I can tell you this. Jesus is in that place with you. He’s been beaten, He’s been spat on, He’s been rejected, He was crucified and suffered the most brutal death on that cross 2,000 years ago and He knows, He knows what it is to suffer first hand, He is in that place with you right now. Psalm 9 verse 9 says that:

The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed and a strong hold in times of trouble.

And Jesus said this. You can read it in Luke chapter 4. He said:

The spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, to recover the sight of the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lords favour.

There are so many aid agencies around the world, government and non government organisations doing so much good work but so often they can’t get through. There’s graft and there’s corruption and there’s war and there’s stealing and there’s plundering and there’s looting. One thing that’s incorruptible, one thing that’s pure and it brings life, is the word of God and through this marvel of radio in Africa where 90% of people have access and listen to radio, more than have access to clean drinking water actually.

I just want to feed your spirit today with Gods word, with Jesus who will never leave you or forsake you. When you place your faith in Him whether it’s, whether it’s a war in Africa or in, in the Sub Continent or it’s just a conflict, if people are dying or maybe you live in the affluent West you know, and you’re just going through conflict in your life right now that’s just ruining life, I want you place your faith in Him. Let Him provide for you and keep you, look to Him and Him alone. Jesus said:

I will never ever leave you or forsake you.

And for those of us in the West, people who aren’t impacted by war I want to ask you to do 2 things. Firstly to pray, maybe God will lay a specific place or a region or a people group on your heart. Pray regularly for them and secondly do something practical: provide, give sacrificially, find a way to put food on just one family’s table in a war zone, pay for one operation. God is calling us not just to sit here but take, but to make a difference, to be used, to be Christ in that place.

Two thirds of the world’s population – over four and a half billion people – don’t have enough to eat. Hunger is a daily reality for so many people. Question is: where is God? Has He deserted us – or is He there right here in the middle of it all? If I were to […]

Two thirds of the world’s population – over four and a half billion people – don’t have enough to eat. Hunger is a daily reality for so many people. Question is: where is God? Has He deserted us – or is He there right here in the middle of it all?

If I were to ask you how many people in the world today are malnourished, what would your estimate be? How many just don’t have enough food to eat? One hundred million, two hundred million, five hundred million, how many? Well the world health organisation estimates that one third of the world is well-fed, one third is under-fed and one third is starving. So with a world population of 6.6 billion, that means that 2.2 billion are starving and 4.4 billion are either under-fed or starving.

And whilst today this program will be heard in a whole bunch of affluent nations like the USA and Australia and New Zealand, more people will be listening across Africa and Asia and the Pacific who don’t have enough food to eat, than that are listening in affluent places who do have enough food to eat. That’s just the reality of this world.

I’ve never been in a position of starvation. I’ve been hungry when I was training to be an officer in the Australian Army. On survival exercises we would go hungry for a few days but that’s different because we always knew that in a few days that was going to end. But starvation and poverty … that’s something that’s entirely different. Starvation is about just not having enough food to live off day after day, week after week, month after month.

It’s about malnutrition, it’s about sickness, it’s about seeing children die. Every three and a half seconds someone dies of malnutrition and in the affluent West, we kind of see these humanitarian disasters splashed across our televisions, the Darfur region, the refugee camps across Africa and Asia and people suffering on an unimaginable scale and we become desensitised to it.

Here’s the reality. Today, right now we produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, there’s actually enough to go around. The sad thing is that there’s an uneven distribution. A survey in the UK recently showed that households throw out 30%, almost one third of the food that they purchase at the supermarket and the greengrocer and the butcher.

We, we have this economic system that sees grain being stock piled and even destroyed to keep prices up. Now this isn’t some left wing diatribe, this is the reality, this is just the way it is in our world and it’s a system frankly, that’s based on greed, on hoarding, on profits.

People are starving and that’s not a God thing, it’s not His fault. He has actually provided plenty; it’s something we’ve caused. It comes back to basic selfishness and greed. Today I want to speak to those who are hungry and to those who are full.

But firstly to those who are hungry. You who are suffering, you who don’t have enough food to put in your stomach or into the stomach of your children, I want to tell you about a God who has compassion on you.

As you read the Bible you discover that God is vitally interested in providing food for the hungry. After oxygen and water food is our most basic need for survival because God made us that way and yet He knows, because of our human greed there will always be hungry people in this world. The suffering of your hunger is something that God understands and I want to encourage you now that He is in that place with you right now. I want to encourage you to lift up your eyes and to put your faith in Him. In the Bible in Psalm 107, verse 8 it says this:

Let them give thanks to the Lord for His unfailing love and His wonderful deeds for all men. For He satisfies the thirsty and He fills the hungry with good things.

He satisfies the thirsty and He fills the hungry with good things.

God is a faithful God and He knows our needs and He has compassion on those who hunger. Even in the most dire circumstances, the most impossible circumstances He will be there for us. Once when Jesus was out preaching to the crowds, thousands of them, there was no food. Listen to what happened:

Jesus called His disciples to Him and said, “I have compassion for these people. They have already been with me for three days and they have nothing to eat. I don’t want to send them away hungry or they may collapse on the way.” But His disciples answered, “Where could we get enough food or bread in this remote place to feed such a crowd?

You see it was completely impossible and Jesus said:

“How many loaves do you have?” “Seven” they replied, “And a few small fish.” Well Jesus told the crowd to sit down on the ground and He took the seven loaves and the fish and when He had given thanks He broke them and gave them to His disciples and they, in turn, to the people. They all ate and were satisfied. Afterward the disciples picked up seven baskets full of broken pieces that were left. The number of those who ate was 4,000 besides the woman and children.

I want you to notice how this all starts. These people are following Jesus, they’re listening to Him, they’re putting their faith in Him and He’s spending time with them and yet He sees that they haven’t eaten He sees that they are hungry.

I have a dear friend, Joseph Kebbie in Africa who fled from fighting in Liberia as a young boy. He was separated from his parents. He lived in a car for twelve months with other teenagers. He fled the freedom fighters in the jungle who wanted to take him as a child soldier. And I listened to him and this young boy, through all his troubles, placed his faith in Jesus and miracle after miracle happened for him and God bought him to safety, God provided for him. Those who are hungry today if you will place your faith in Him, in Jesus, He will be there with you.

You know people still die of starvation but Jesus was the one who said:

Blessed are those who hunger now for you will be satisfied.

God is in that place, God understands the need of the hungry, He’s here to comfort you today through His word. I can’t put food through the radio, I can’t put bread or rice or meat through the radio. What I can do is bring to you something that brings life and that is the word of God.

Now I just want to talk briefly to those who have enough. Will you do something? Will you do something practical and sacrificial to provide for just one family amongst those 4.4 billion, these two thirds of the worlds population? Can you find a way to put food on one family’s table? Can I tell you something that Jacqui and I have done? We have a heart for preaching the word of God and yes, we support that but we believe that it’s important to put food on the table so there are three families in the developing world who, tonight will have food on their table because we believe that we can’t sit here in affluence and not provide for them.

Can I encourage you to do something, will you please if you are wealthy and you have enough, make sure that you put food on the table of just one family who can’t afford it?

Two thirds of the world’s population – over four and a half billion people – don’t have enough to eat. Hunger is a daily reality for so many people. Question is: where is God? Has He deserted us – or is He there right here in the middle of it all? If I were to […]

Two thirds of the world’s population – over four and a half billion people – don’t have enough to eat. Hunger is a daily reality for so many people. Question is: where is God? Has He deserted us – or is He there right here in the middle of it all?

If I were to ask you how many people in the world today are malnourished, what would your estimate be? How many just don’t have enough food to eat? One hundred million, two hundred million, five hundred million, how many? Well the world health organisation estimates that one third of the world is well-fed, one third is under-fed and one third is starving. So with a world population of 6.6 billion, that means that 2.2 billion are starving and 4.4 billion are either under-fed or starving.

And whilst today this program will be heard in a whole bunch of affluent nations like the USA and Australia and New Zealand, more people will be listening across Africa and Asia and the Pacific who don’t have enough food to eat, than that are listening in affluent places who do have enough food to eat. That’s just the reality of this world.

I’ve never been in a position of starvation. I’ve been hungry when I was training to be an officer in the Australian Army. On survival exercises we would go hungry for a few days but that’s different because we always knew that in a few days that was going to end. But starvation and poverty … that’s something that’s entirely different. Starvation is about just not having enough food to live off day after day, week after week, month after month.

It’s about malnutrition, it’s about sickness, it’s about seeing children die. Every three and a half seconds someone dies of malnutrition and in the affluent West, we kind of see these humanitarian disasters splashed across our televisions, the Darfur region, the refugee camps across Africa and Asia and people suffering on an unimaginable scale and we become desensitised to it.

Here’s the reality. Today, right now we produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, there’s actually enough to go around. The sad thing is that there’s an uneven distribution. A survey in the UK recently showed that households throw out 30%, almost one third of the food that they purchase at the supermarket and the greengrocer and the butcher.

We, we have this economic system that sees grain being stock piled and even destroyed to keep prices up. Now this isn’t some left wing diatribe, this is the reality, this is just the way it is in our world and it’s a system frankly, that’s based on greed, on hoarding, on profits.

People are starving and that’s not a God thing, it’s not His fault. He has actually provided plenty; it’s something we’ve caused. It comes back to basic selfishness and greed. Today I want to speak to those who are hungry and to those who are full.

But firstly to those who are hungry. You who are suffering, you who don’t have enough food to put in your stomach or into the stomach of your children, I want to tell you about a God who has compassion on you.

As you read the Bible you discover that God is vitally interested in providing food for the hungry. After oxygen and water food is our most basic need for survival because God made us that way and yet He knows, because of our human greed there will always be hungry people in this world. The suffering of your hunger is something that God understands and I want to encourage you now that He is in that place with you right now. I want to encourage you to lift up your eyes and to put your faith in Him. In the Bible in Psalm 107, verse 8 it says this:

Let them give thanks to the Lord for His unfailing love and His wonderful deeds for all men. For He satisfies the thirsty and He fills the hungry with good things.

He satisfies the thirsty and He fills the hungry with good things.

God is a faithful God and He knows our needs and He has compassion on those who hunger. Even in the most dire circumstances, the most impossible circumstances He will be there for us. Once when Jesus was out preaching to the crowds, thousands of them, there was no food. Listen to what happened:

Jesus called His disciples to Him and said, “I have compassion for these people. They have already been with me for three days and they have nothing to eat. I don’t want to send them away hungry or they may collapse on the way.” But His disciples answered, “Where could we get enough food or bread in this remote place to feed such a crowd?

You see it was completely impossible and Jesus said:

“How many loaves do you have?” “Seven” they replied, “And a few small fish.” Well Jesus told the crowd to sit down on the ground and He took the seven loaves and the fish and when He had given thanks He broke them and gave them to His disciples and they, in turn, to the people. They all ate and were satisfied. Afterward the disciples picked up seven baskets full of broken pieces that were left. The number of those who ate was 4,000 besides the woman and children.

I want you to notice how this all starts. These people are following Jesus, they’re listening to Him, they’re putting their faith in Him and He’s spending time with them and yet He sees that they haven’t eaten He sees that they are hungry.

I have a dear friend, Joseph Kebbie in Africa who fled from fighting in Liberia as a young boy. He was separated from his parents. He lived in a car for twelve months with other teenagers. He fled the freedom fighters in the jungle who wanted to take him as a child soldier. And I listened to him and this young boy, through all his troubles, placed his faith in Jesus and miracle after miracle happened for him and God bought him to safety, God provided for him. Those who are hungry today if you will place your faith in Him, in Jesus, He will be there with you.

You know people still die of starvation but Jesus was the one who said:

Blessed are those who hunger now for you will be satisfied.

God is in that place, God understands the need of the hungry, He’s here to comfort you today through His word. I can’t put food through the radio, I can’t put bread or rice or meat through the radio. What I can do is bring to you something that brings life and that is the word of God.

Now I just want to talk briefly to those who have enough. Will you do something? Will you do something practical and sacrificial to provide for just one family amongst those 4.4 billion, these two thirds of the worlds population? Can you find a way to put food on one family’s table? Can I tell you something that Jacqui and I have done? We have a heart for preaching the word of God and yes, we support that but we believe that it’s important to put food on the table so there are three families in the developing world who, tonight will have food on their table because we believe that we can’t sit here in affluence and not provide for them.

Can I encourage you to do something, will you please if you are wealthy and you have enough, make sure that you put food on the table of just one family who can’t afford it?

None of us ever, ever wants to be sick. But – sickness is a fact of life. And the hard thing is that whatever’s happening to our body affects our soul. You can’t separate the two. I have to confess, I am not a good patient when I find myself feeling sick. I had a […]

None of us ever, ever wants to be sick. But – sickness is a fact of life. And the hard thing is that whatever’s happening to our body affects our soul. You can’t separate the two.

I have to confess, I am not a good patient when I find myself feeling sick. I had a cold the other week and you know I’m one of these people who just wants to get up and keep going and after a couple of hours, even half a day, I have had more than enough. And yet for so many people, sickness is a very real issue. People with cancer, some will suffer and be cured others will suffer and die. Young and old, male and female, rich and poor – sickness and disease have no favourites.

We live in a world where each one of us will finally breathe our last breathe and die. It’s just the way it is. I remember when my father was in hospital and the day I had visited him, and the Doctor had just been there to tell him that there was nothing more that they could do for him. A few weeks later he was gone. It was so hard. Where’s God in all of that? Why is it that He allows this sort of sickness? What can we discover about God in the midst of sickness and disease?

Have you ever had something wrong with you and you’ve gone to the Doctor and they run some tests and you just fear the worst? Maybe you’re a woman and you have a lump in your breast, or you’re a man and you have a pain in your side, or there’s a blemish on your skin that changed colour, or you’re just feeling really, really sick.

It’s a time when we end up coming face to face with our own mortality and day by day we actually don’t think about our mortality that much. If everything’s going on well and we’re just going to work or school or whatever it is we do, we never think about it. But all of a sudden there’s this pain in your hip and it goes on and on and on, and you think, “Boy, I hope it’s not something serious.”

The reality is sooner or later we’re going to die. Most times when we go to the Doctor our worst fears aren’t realised. So often there’s another explanation and it all heals itself. It’s not cancer, it’s not heart disease or it’s not what we were afraid it would be. But when sickness or disease does strike us it’s a big deal. It can be devastating, there’s a whole range of human emotions, “Why me?”

Fear and uncertainty, and anger and frustration, and people go through roller coaster rides. And what’s normal is that the physical illness spills over into our emotions because you can’t separate body from soul. You can’t say, “Well my body’s sick but gee, I’m okay. My heads okay, I’ll feel fine in my head”, because people do go through those normal human emotions of fear and uncertainty. And the pain disables us. And when you’re not well you start feeling ‘not well’ in your heart.

You and I know, when we have the flu and we just feel awful, it doesn’t just affect our body but it strikes our heart and our soul right? Just 3 or 4 days of being knocked down by some tiny little virus we can’t see and you know how down we can feel. But when it’s something much worse, the pain and incapacitation that comes after a major accident, a life threatening or even terminal cancer, a heart attack, major surgery, well it’s pretty human to feel devastated because the uncertainty of the future not to mention the impact of the physical sickness on our emotions is really hard.

I had a friend who went through chemotherapy after a cancer operation and it wasn’t just the trauma of the life threatening cancer, that was bad enough but anybody who has been through chemotherapy will tell you how sick they feel from the chemotherapy. I mean the chemotherapy is much better today than it was but people still feel really sick and as much as we might live day by day and hope and pray that these things won’t happen to us, they do, that’s life. One out of one will die according to the statistics and those times have a sharp focus on, well in what we believe.

Christians believe in divine healing and I think we should. I heard a Christian, really well meaning, get up the other day and say, “God doesn’t heal today.” What a load of rubbish, I have seen God heal and I have seen people healed miraculously by God. Jesus healed the blind and the incapacitated and those with leprosy and that gift of healing is still alive and well today and I know people who’ve been healed of serious diseases and they get up and they share their testimony and they’re things that that the Doctor said that they could never be healed from. God has the capacity and the will to intervene supernaturally and He often does.

There was an absolutely impossible healing. A man who was blind from birth. He was in his late thirties and Jesus reached out when Jesus was walking on this earth and healed him and everyone around them was amazed and so they should be. But you know something, sometimes God choose not to heal. I don’t know why but sovereignly He chooses to heal some and not others.

I look at the apostle Paul and God used this man in the most amazing way. He wrote almost half the books in the New Testament, he converted much of the known world at the time, in the 1st Century, to faith in Christ. Here’s what Paul writes in 2 Corinthians chapter 12 beginning at verse 7:

There was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger from Satan to torment me. Three times I pleaded with God to take it away from me but God said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Therefore Paul said, “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christs power may rest on me.” That is why for Christ’s sake I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties for when I am weak then I am strong.

What was the thorn? Was it a physical affliction? Was it a temptation that kept hitting Paul? Was it some deficiency in his character? We don’t know but what we know from what he writes he is that it caused him to suffer and three times Paul pleaded with God to take it away.

Now can I tell you, if anybody can convince God of healing it would have to be Paul wouldn’t it? I mean Paul himself was used to heal so many people. This guy writes half the New Testament and we’re still reading it 2,000 years on. Three times Paul pleaded with God and the answer was, “No, I actually have a purpose in that thorn in your flesh.”

Whatever it is, I really thank God that we don’t find out exactly what this thorn is so that you and I can’t say, “Oh look, I’ve got what Paul’s got”. No, there’s no pride in this. There’s a thorn in Paul’s flesh and God, the sovereign God who chooses to heal some and not others, to Paul said, “No”. He said:

My grace is sufficient to you.

And when we’re sick, when we don’t know the future, when we’re afraid and uncertain and unwell, Jesus is in that place with us and His grace is sufficient for us.

Sometimes God brings us low and sometimes it’s just for a season, sometimes it’s on our way to eternity, His sovereign choice. One day my body is going to give up on me and it’s the same with yours and I’d prefer to just to wake up dead one morning but maybe I’ll have to suffer for weeks or months or even years, I don’t know and probably you don’t know either.

There’s something incredibly special about being in that place, completely vulnerable and defenceless and putting our trust in Jesus. Every situation is different but God is the same and His grace and His presence and His mercy are sufficient for us.

Loneliness is such a dreadful thing. It’s a hunger – a need to be loved and accepted and connected – that goes unmet. When we travel through those lonely places….where’s God exactly? One of the hardest things in life is being alone. It happens to different people at different times, a teenager growing up might […]

Loneliness is such a dreadful thing. It’s a hunger – a need to be loved and accepted and connected – that goes unmet. When we travel through those lonely places….where’s God exactly?

One of the hardest things in life is being alone. It happens to different people at different times, a teenager growing up might feel misunderstood, that’s a lonely place to be. Someone who’s married can feel like their husband or their wife is so distant, that’s lonely. Work and children and pressures and responsibilities conspire against marriages. In fact we can be surrounded by crowds of people and yet still feel desperately alone.

It can even be that people are reaching out to us but somehow we feel incapable of making that soul connection. We’re like a dry sponge that somehow can’t take any relationships in just at the moment. As we grow older the children leave and they have their own busy lives and perhaps a husband dies and the widow’s left alone. Whatever its form loneliness can be a terrible place and it can go on for a very long time.

When I look back on my life there have been a couple of times in particular that I can point to when I was really lonely. When I was a teenager growing up I like, almost, I think, all teenagers feel this. They feel misunderstood by their parents and for me too, I was so different to my peers. I was short and dumpy and clever, I was a musician and not a sportsman, always a bit of a misfit you know, I was never one of the “beautiful people”. That was a lonely time for me.

And there was a time as an adult when I was on my own for several years. People, yeah sure there were people at work and people at Church but there were no real “soul ties”, you know what I mean. I’m not one to get lonely really very much at all, I have a fairly healthy self esteem, I feel good about myself, I truly enjoy peace and quiet and my own space and my own company and yet I’ve been in that deep place of loneliness, it’s like, it’s like a dark pit.

How do you put words around this, this thing “loneliness”? All sorts of different circumstances and situations and different times of our lives that it happens, what’s the common thread, what defines loneliness? I read this definition in an online encyclopaedia called Wikipedia and I think it’s pretty good. They write:

Loneliness is an emotional state in which a person experiences a powerful feeling of emptiness and isolation. Loneliness is more that just the feeling of wanting company or wanting to do something with another person, loneliness is a feeling of being cut off, disconnected and alienated from other people.

The lonely person finds it difficult or even impossible to have any form of meaningful human contact. Lonely people often experience a subjective sense of emptiness and hollowness with feelings of separation and isolation from the world.

Oh, you know I think we can all relate to that, I think we all travel through some lonely places sometimes in life, some more than others. Some maybe have a personality that’s more predisposed to being alone than others but that sense of isolation and emptiness, the lack of connectedness, the being pulled apart from other people.

I was reading a really interesting perspective the other day, it’s something that Mother Theresa said. Have a listen, have a listen to this, I think it’s powerful stuff. She said:

When Christ said, “I was hungry and you fed me” He didn’t mean only the hunger for bread and for food, He also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness, He came amongst His own and yet His own received Him not and it hurt Him then, it has kept hurting Him.

The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no-one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in His loneliness and that is the hardest part, that’s the real hunger.

Isn’t that profound? It makes you think you know, there’s a loneliness, a hunger, it’s our most basic emotional need going unmet. The need to be loved, the need to belong, the need to know that there’s someone out there, just one person who misses you, who’s thinking about you, who wants you.

That’s what loneliness is and it’s really weird because Jesus was followed by huge crowds, I mean He had rock star status and yet so often He was alone and it was those crowds, those very same people, were the ones who demanded His crucifixion but all the way along Jesus knew that. Have a listen to how John puts it, in John chapter 2, verse 23:

When He was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival many believed in Jesus name because they saw that the miracles and the signs that He was doing but Jesus for His part wouldn’t entrust Himself to them because He knew them all.

See, He had rock star status, He had huge crowds and those same crowds bayed for His blood and deserted Him. He always knew public opinion, human acclamation, are a fickle thing. And Peter the apostle said, “Lord, I’ll stick by you, I’ll stick through everything, I’ll even die with you” and yet, you probably know the story, when he said that to Jesus, Jesus said, “Look here, it’s night time, before that rooster crows in the morning you’ll have denied me 3 times.” And Peter said, “No no I won’t do that and sure enough, when Jesus was being led to trial before His crucifixion, 3 times Peter denies Jesus, 3 times.

One by one the crowds, His closest supporters, His family, they all left Him. He was beaten and mocked and crucified and they left Him completely alone but you know as impossibly difficult and painful as that was, He was prepared for it. Have a listen to what Luke says about Jesus:

The news about Jesus spread all the more so the crowds of people came to hear Him and be healed of their sicknesses but Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

Listen to that again:

Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

See I think that’s what’s going on here is that out there in that wilderness, out there in those lonely places, out there away from the hype and the hoop-la and the limelight and the crowds and the “oohs” and the “aahs” and the recognition, out there in those lonely places is where Jesus spent time with His Dad. There’s something in that.

In the times where I’ve been desperately lonely, feeling that isolation and that, that disconnectedness and the pain that comes with that in those lonely places, they were the times when God stepped in. How do I explain it? I was sitting once alone weeping in my loneliness and I just had this powerful sense of God’s presence in that place, an overwhelming knowledge that I was being surrounded and filled with His spirit.

In that lonely place that’s where I became addicted to God, I wanted more and more and more of Him. Somehow amidst the darkness and the pain His light shone so brightly. I look back on those times as the greatest opportunity that God would ever give me, out there in the lonely places and I believe that’s why God lets us go to them, that’s why God lets us walk in that loneliness because it’s the opportunity He gives us to discover His steadfast and wondrous love.

Loneliness is such a dreadful thing. It’s a hunger – a need to be loved and accepted and connected – that goes unmet. When we travel through those lonely places….where’s God exactly?

One of the hardest things in life is being alone. It happens to different people at different times, a teenager growing up might feel misunderstood, that’s a lonely place to be. Someone who’s married can feel like their husband or their wife is so distant, that’s lonely. Work and children and pressures and responsibilities conspire against marriages. In fact we can be surrounded by crowds of people and yet still feel desperately alone.

It can even be that people are reaching out to us but somehow we feel incapable of making that soul connection. We’re like a dry sponge that somehow can’t take any relationships in just at the moment. As we grow older the children leave and they have their own busy lives and perhaps a husband dies and the widow’s left alone. Whatever its form loneliness can be a terrible place and it can go on for a very long time.

When I look back on my life there have been a couple of times in particular that I can point to when I was really lonely. When I was a teenager growing up I like, almost, I think, all teenagers feel this. They feel misunderstood by their parents and for me too, I was so different to my peers. I was short and dumpy and clever, I was a musician and not a sportsman, always a bit of a misfit you know, I was never one of the “beautiful people”. That was a lonely time for me.

And there was a time as an adult when I was on my own for several years. People, yeah sure there were people at work and people at Church but there were no real “soul ties”, you know what I mean. I’m not one to get lonely really very much at all, I have a fairly healthy self esteem, I feel good about myself, I truly enjoy peace and quiet and my own space and my own company and yet I’ve been in that deep place of loneliness, it’s like, it’s like a dark pit.

How do you put words around this, this thing “loneliness”? All sorts of different circumstances and situations and different times of our lives that it happens, what’s the common thread, what defines loneliness? I read this definition in an online encyclopaedia called Wikipedia and I think it’s pretty good. They write:

Loneliness is an emotional state in which a person experiences a powerful feeling of emptiness and isolation. Loneliness is more that just the feeling of wanting company or wanting to do something with another person, loneliness is a feeling of being cut off, disconnected and alienated from other people.

The lonely person finds it difficult or even impossible to have any form of meaningful human contact. Lonely people often experience a subjective sense of emptiness and hollowness with feelings of separation and isolation from the world.

Oh, you know I think we can all relate to that, I think we all travel through some lonely places sometimes in life, some more than others. Some maybe have a personality that’s more predisposed to being alone than others but that sense of isolation and emptiness, the lack of connectedness, the being pulled apart from other people.

I was reading a really interesting perspective the other day, it’s something that Mother Theresa said. Have a listen, have a listen to this, I think it’s powerful stuff. She said:

When Christ said, “I was hungry and you fed me” He didn’t mean only the hunger for bread and for food, He also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness, He came amongst His own and yet His own received Him not and it hurt Him then, it has kept hurting Him.

The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no-one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in His loneliness and that is the hardest part, that’s the real hunger.

Isn’t that profound? It makes you think you know, there’s a loneliness, a hunger, it’s our most basic emotional need going unmet. The need to be loved, the need to belong, the need to know that there’s someone out there, just one person who misses you, who’s thinking about you, who wants you.

That’s what loneliness is and it’s really weird because Jesus was followed by huge crowds, I mean He had rock star status and yet so often He was alone and it was those crowds, those very same people, were the ones who demanded His crucifixion but all the way along Jesus knew that. Have a listen to how John puts it, in John chapter 2, verse 23:

When He was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival many believed in Jesus name because they saw that the miracles and the signs that He was doing but Jesus for His part wouldn’t entrust Himself to them because He knew them all.

See, He had rock star status, He had huge crowds and those same crowds bayed for His blood and deserted Him. He always knew public opinion, human acclamation, are a fickle thing. And Peter the apostle said, “Lord, I’ll stick by you, I’ll stick through everything, I’ll even die with you” and yet, you probably know the story, when he said that to Jesus, Jesus said, “Look here, it’s night time, before that rooster crows in the morning you’ll have denied me 3 times.” And Peter said, “No no I won’t do that and sure enough, when Jesus was being led to trial before His crucifixion, 3 times Peter denies Jesus, 3 times.

One by one the crowds, His closest supporters, His family, they all left Him. He was beaten and mocked and crucified and they left Him completely alone but you know as impossibly difficult and painful as that was, He was prepared for it. Have a listen to what Luke says about Jesus:

The news about Jesus spread all the more so the crowds of people came to hear Him and be healed of their sicknesses but Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

Listen to that again:

Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

See I think that’s what’s going on here is that out there in that wilderness, out there in those lonely places, out there away from the hype and the hoop-la and the limelight and the crowds and the “oohs” and the “aahs” and the recognition, out there in those lonely places is where Jesus spent time with His Dad. There’s something in that.

In the times where I’ve been desperately lonely, feeling that isolation and that, that disconnectedness and the pain that comes with that in those lonely places, they were the times when God stepped in. How do I explain it? I was sitting once alone weeping in my loneliness and I just had this powerful sense of God’s presence in that place, an overwhelming knowledge that I was being surrounded and filled with His spirit.

In that lonely place that’s where I became addicted to God, I wanted more and more and more of Him. Somehow amidst the darkness and the pain His light shone so brightly. I look back on those times as the greatest opportunity that God would ever give me, out there in the lonely places and I believe that’s why God lets us go to them, that’s why God lets us walk in that loneliness because it’s the opportunity He gives us to discover His steadfast and wondrous love.